SAP Debuts HANA-Powered Precision Retailing Cloud Service

SAP today unveiled Precision Retailing, a cloud-based service powered by the company's HANA in-memory analytics platform, which allows retailers to deliver suggestions and personalized offers to customers in real-time on websites, mobile devices and at in-store kiosks.

The aim, says SAP Labs' Retail Consumer Mobile Initiative Vice President Herve Pluche, is to maximize retailers' marketing efforts. Precision Retailing can reach and influence consumers at precisely the moment it matters most: right before checkout.

"With this solution, companies can maximize the return on their marketing investment. At the same time, they can create an enhanced shopping experience by collecting and acting on massive amounts of data about consumer behavior in real time and delivering relevant offers while the customer is standing right in the aisle," says Pluche in remarks prepared for the press.

According to SAP, early adopters are already seeing fuller shopping carts.

Thanks to personalized offers that are delivered at the point of purchase, SAP claims Precision Retailing is helping retailers achieve an up to 20 percent increase in promotional conversion rates and a 15 percent increase in average basket size. SAP also reports a 10 percent boost in upselling and cross-selling suggested products.

The promotions are generated by analyzing a consumer's profile, preferences and purchase history and correlating them with data on shopping context, location and in-store product availability. The payoff -- SAP and retailers hope -- are targeted and timely offers that are too good for shoppers to resist and help swell retailers' margins.

The solution also marks the latest in SAP's efforts to extend its reach into cloud-based Big Data analytics.

This summer, SAP detailed its plans to incentivize its sales partners to help grow the HANA ecosystem. During the press call it was revealed that the company is exploring ways of courting more HANA developers by delivering its own development instance hosting solution. As of July, Amazon Web Services was far and away the platform of choice with approximately 4,000 instances of HANA on its cloud.